Does this Keyword Planner result make logical sense?
I entered roughly 800 keywords in Keyword Planner for two target locations:
- San Antonio TX, Texas, United States
- San Jose, California, United States
The summary data for the Historical Metrics result set by Location is as follows:
I then added 18 more locations to the same keyword list to create this list of target locations.
- Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
- Austin TX, Texas, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Cincinnati OH, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- Columbia SC, South Carolina, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- Fort Worth, Texas, United States
- Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- Indianapolis IN, Indiana, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- Jacksonville FL, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- Miami, Florida, United States
- New Haven County, Connecticut, United States county
- Oakland, California, United States city
- Orlando, Florida, United States city
- Richmond-Petersburg VA, Virginia, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- Salt Lake City UT, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- San Antonio TX, Texas, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- San Jose, California, United States
- Syracuse NY, New York, United States Nielsen® DMA® regions
- Trenton, New Jersey, United States city
- Warsaw, Indiana, United States city
The summary data for this Historical Metrics result set by Location is as follows:
How does this make sense? Why would San Antonio disappear from the list? Why would the volume for San Jose go down?
If the average number of times that the 800 keywords have been viewed in San Jose is 324. Then that should be the total views, what happens in other cities should not affect that.
But 20 cities times 800 keywords gives 16000 combinations.
Google is not going to aggregate combinations that are of no interest. Therefore, only the most popular combinations get added to the aggregation. This could explain why the totals for a city go down.
Interesting theory. It makes no sense to report data like this but it could be correct, I guess.
It appears that your total number of Average monthly searches did go up. My guess is that they are only showing you the top 5 segments, and San Antonio was not among the first 5.
My guess is that when you added 18 more locations, many of them were more popular and pushed San Antonio down. My guess is it is there but buried in the summary results. See if you can drill down to see more results.
My guess as to why San Jose went down is due to spending limits running out. Basically, more popular search locations ate up the funds faster than San Jose and San Antonio.
That's how PPC bidding works. Google will spend the money allocated on whichever criteria matches first.
This is just historical search data. Budget should be irrelevant for this dataset.
Oh. My mistake. I thought these numbers came from Google Analytics. You didn't specify and I assumed.